My 50c:
I loved the arguments and input provided by Alonso, augus, Banan-mat and surprisingly to me - jesus. A lot of good, valid points.
The problem indeed has two main directions where it can be battled effectively without creating a lazareth - stamina and game shape.
1) Game shape:Instead of increasing injuries (which is not the way to go imo), we could just introduce an algorithm that has a % chance to decrease GS based on minutes played in B3/BBM games in addition to the regular weekly games (
after all psychologist, massage doctors & regular weekly games effects are applied). Again, exponential ofc, starting from like 0% for <40 mins to possibly close to 100% for 48+ mins. Now those occasional overtime games will hit us hard on that regard but well, they do play a part in real life too. If we don't want this to happen the 40-48min penalty range might not be hard-coded but instead be percentages of the total game time (~80-100%).
This will inevitably hurt the game shape of short rosters and respectively their performance and cost-efficiency. Due to the game engine imperfections that were mentioned however <40 mins could be hard to achieve for players with 7+ stamina even if decent substitutes are present in the roster. That leads me to the second part of my proposed solution:
2) Stamina:augus mentioned that we need an exponential algorithm to decrease player performance late in games. I completely agree ofc but I believe that the current algorithm is already exponential to begin with. The trouble is that it doesn't work hard enough for players with high endurance and even if it did - there's still the issue of 7+ stamina players staying on the floor for the whole game duration despite the coach instructions.
One thing that comes to mind (and it seems like a very easy fix) is to make stamina work "out of 20", instead of "out of 10" but not let us be able to train it past 10 (as it is now). This way we will effectively not be able to have stamina higher than the current levels of 5. That will in turn decrease players' performance late in games further and more importantly let the subs play more minutes without the need of touching the spaghetti code of the engine itself.
It is very important imo that those two measures are taken together in order to achieve the desired effects. The GS part is easy to test offline and the stamina part can be tested in PL games and scrimmages without causing any trouble.
One last thing - I wrote all this off of one foot and haven't really thought it through, so there could be some aspects I'm missing. Please don't crucify me if so!
BBB: 2 (S37 S38); Top tier: 7 (S35 S36 S37 S38 S39 S41 S63); Cup: 9 (S25 S35 S36 S37 S38 S39 S40 S41 S61)